Whereas addressing recipients of the Claremont McKenna Faculty scholarship that bears his title, Robert Addison Day made the seemingly gratuitous supply to satisfy them individually for lunch on the unique California Membership in Los Angeles.
Two dared to ask and discovered the supply was actual.
“One other scholar and I reached out and had been quickly having lunch with Mr. Day,” Juliet Archer, a member of the category of 2011, wrote in a submit on the school web site.
The 2 college students discovered Day genuinely fascinated about their experiences and aspirations.
“He patiently answered our questions and regaled us with tales of his profession and what he’s discovered alongside the best way,” Archer wrote. “When he received to a humorous level within the story, he at all times leaned in with a figuring out smile.”
That humor and private contact had been frequent threads of the tributes that poured out from former college students and colleagues of the financier, philanthropist and longtime Claremont McKenna trustee who died Sept. 14 at age 79.
“ In his soft-spoken voice, he at all times tried to reply every scholar, typically with a twinkle in his eye or smirk on his face when he knew his response was going to attract amusing,” wrote Michelle Chamberlain, a vp on the faculty who heads the Robert Day Students Program.
Day was the third technology of his household to guide the W.M. Keck Basis, began by his grandfather, oil entrepreneur William Myron Keck.
In that position, he had a serious impression on Southern California by donations to Claremont McKenna and USC and to well being analysis nationally.
Items of greater than $272 million to USC are “seen day by day within the college’s hospitals, clinics, analysis labs and school rooms,” the college wrote in a memorial.
Born in 1943 in Los Angeles, Day enrolled at Claremont Males’s Faculty in 1960.
Rick Realized, a 1966 graduate, recalled that Day had the one electrical calculator of their dorm and “was beneficiant about letting us examine our accounting homework on it.”
In 1966, Day submitted his senior thesis, “A Proposal for an Funding Advisory Firm.”
After working in institutional gross sales for White Weld & Co. in New York, he returned to California to begin that firm. Starting with $2 million in belongings underneath administration in 1971, Belief Co. of the West grew over 40 years to $248 billion.
At age 29, Day turned Claremont McKenna’s youngest elected trustee and twenty years later its youngest chairman.
His $200-million pledge in 2007 to create the Robert Day Students Program was the biggest recorded present to a liberal arts faculty, in accordance with the school biography.
He took over management of the Keck Basis in 1996 after serving on its board for 28 years.
In a assertion posted on the muse web site, his son Joseph Day and cousin Steve Day, co-chief executives, stated the muse awarded grants totaling $2 billion underneath his path and presently has $1.5 billion in belongings.
“His tenure noticed a exceptional eight scientists the muse funded early of their work granted 9 Nobel Prizes, 5 named MacArthur Fellows, two obtain Benjamin Franklin Awards, and two obtain Lasker Awards,” they wrote.
Day was a crack skeet shooter, in accordance with former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who referred to as him Addison in recognition of their shared center names.
“First, he was a deadeye shot. And second he knew learn how to educate that talent, one thing he employed to make me a greater hunter,” Baker wrote on the Claremont McKenna remembrance web page, including that he met Day on the skeet vary at Northern California’s Bohemian Grove.
Along with his son Joseph, Day’s survivors embody his spouse, Marlyn Day; his daughter, DiDi; his son Jon, and a number of other grandchildren.
